Reject proposal banning Sharia

THOMAS S. KIDD, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Published 6:30 am, Sunday, January 23, 2011

Last week, Texas state Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, proposed a Texas state constitutional amendment that would prevent Texas courts from applying "any religious or cultural law." Many Texans are understandably concerned about the threat posed by Muslim jihadists around the world who believe in imposing Sharia, the sacred law of Islam, wherever possible. However, this is no way to address that Muslim threat. This amendment not only sends the wrong message to Muslims in Texas; it sets an ironic precedent that "religious and cultural" values have no place in our laws.

Berman is following Oklahoma, where voters adopted a similar amendment in the November election. That amendment was subsequently blocked by a federal judge, who ruled it violated the First Amendment. My concern is not so much that this initiative violates the First Amendment — an overused argument, if there ever was one - but that the law would officially oppose the religion of a significant number of Texans, and that it makes an absurd distinction between law, culture and religion.

Hundreds of thousands of Muslims live in Texas, with especially large numbers in Houston. (Pakistanis probably represent the largest Muslim group in Texas.) It is an observable fact that the vast majority of Texas Muslims live in peace with their nonMuslim neighbors, and have no practical interest in imposing Sharia on Texans. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, most obviously the accused Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan, who infamously murdered 13 people, apparently in the name of Islam. Muslims worldwide have to contend with the fact that among their one billion adherents, there is certainly a jihadist element that kills in Islam's name, and would impose Muslim law on others.

But does that reality require the state of Texas to adopt what, by any reasonable standard, is an anti-Muslim amendment? No, this is hardly the message we should send to our Muslim citizens. Instead, we should focus on rigorously rooting out terror cells in America and abroad, and controlling immigration so that radicals such as the "underwear bomber," Umar Abdulmutallab, are never admitted to the country. But we have several million Muslims already living in America, and communicating religious hostility toward them as official government policy is totally inappropriate. Doing so will only help radicalize those already on the margins of jihadism.

Furthermore, a look at the text of this amendment shows just how ill-conceived it is. Not apply any "religious or cultural law"? Many religious conservatives and traditional jurists might wonder what other kind of law there is. To be fair, the amendment implies that courts should only consider law approved through normal legislative processes or a referendum, but in the end, this amendment implies that religion and culture cannot influence our law as Texans.

The problem is that religion and culture inform all law. Our laws emerge from a common Judeo-Christian, or one might say Abrahamic, tradition of morality. This is especially true of criminal law. We know that murder and stealing are wrong because our time-honored religious principles have told us so, from Moses' descent from Mount Sinai to today. Texans overwhelmingly approved a ban on same-sex marriage in 2005 - would anyone deny that much of the support for this amendment emerged from religious conviction? Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Surely all Texans would agree that no religious minority should impose its specific requirements on us all, whether this minority's requirements emerge from a Christian sect, Mormonism, Judaism or Islam. I suspect that we can agree, for instance, that we should not pass a law requiring all women in Texas to wear a head covering (the hijab), nor should judges make a ruling to that effect. But is that a real threat? I see no evidence that it is. A more realistic challenge comes from those who say that faith should have no role whatsoever in American public life. It is highly ironic, showing just how poorly framed the amendment is, that this strict separation of faith from law is just what Berman's amendment seems to endorse.